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Iconoclast H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) was an American newspaper columnist, magazine editor, and author of at least 30 books, most notably, "The American Language."
A sampling of Menken quotes:
The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
The honorary degree is a way of honoring a pompous ass. No honest person would accept a degree he hadn't worked for. Honorary degrees are suitable only for realtors, chiropractors and presidents of the United States.
All professional philosophers tend to assume that common sense means the mental habit of the common man. Nothing could be further from the mark. The common man is chiefly to be distinguished by his plentiful lack of common sense: he believes things on evidence that is too scanty, or that distorts the plain facts, or that is full of non sequiturs. Common sense really involves making full use of all the demonstrable evidence and of nothing but the demonstrable evidence.
The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong
probability that yours is a fake.
Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers.
The country high-schools of the United States no longer make any pretense to rational teaching. Now that every yokel above the intellectual level of an earthworm is run through them, their more intelligent teachers give up in despair, for not more than a small
percentage of the pupils they face are really educable, at least beyond the fifth-grade level. The average curriculum shows a smaller and smaller admixture of rational instruction, and is made up more and more of simple time-killers. The high-school, in its earlier form of the academy, was a hard and even harsh school, but it actually taught a great deal. But in its modern form it is hardly more than a banal aggregation of social clubs. Every student of any pretensions belongs to a dozen--imitation fraternities, bands and orchestras, athletic teams, and so on...The State universities are commonly required by law to take in, sight unseen, the graduates of these burlesque institutions of learning. As a result, they go downhill rapidly, and many of them are already burlesques themselves. As the
student body increases in quantity it declines correspondingly in quality.
The theory behind representative government is that superior men--or at all events, men not inferior to the average in ability and integrity--are chosen to manage the public business, and that they carry on this work with reasonable intelligence and honesty. There is little support for that theory in the known facts...
No more than one man in ten, at least in the United States, is really a master of the trade he practises. The rest take money for doing what they are quite incompetent to do, and thus live by false pretenses...
Man's limitations are also visible in his gods. Yahveh seems to have had His hands full with the Devil from the start. His plans for Adam and Eve went to pot, and He failed again with Noah. His worst failure came when He sent His only-begotten Son into the world to rescue man from sin. It would be hard to imagine any scheme falling further from success.
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